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Category Archives: programming

Spin locks and the vicious multi-threading cycle

Multithreading is a subject that is really hard for me to keep straight in my head. This is a typical timeline of my neuron activity in any multi-threading topic that’s above absolutely basic. Time X: Awareness of a sore lack of understanding about topic. Time X+1: Read the wikipedia article and top few Google search […]

A useful C++ interview question

It’s surprising how few people who say they know C++ really know C++. This is my favourite basic C++ interview question. Lets say you want to write your own, simple fixed-size vector class for integers. The specification is simple — construct the vector with one argument, the size of the vector. Construction creates a vector […]

Introducing write-only

Writing has become harder for me over time, evidenced by the dropping frequency of posting here over the last few years. Every now and then I resolve to fix the situation, which usually results in nothing more than a short-lived spurt of words. I think the only strategy that has remotely been successful is my […]

Moronic beyond belief

That’s me, in case you didn’t already know. While a lifetime of evidence exists, in the interests of brevity, I will only present its latest manifestation. Warning: this is a work-related (read: geeky) rant. if ( A or B ) // A and B are some valid conditions { if ( A ) return x; […]

TiddlyWiki hack – blog plugin

I use TiddlyWiki to maintain a journal about my daily research work. It serves very well because all the journal data is kept in a single html file, which is viewable on any platform using Firefox – hence it’s far easier to put in version control. Anyhow, one thing was lacking – I wanted a […]

Thought for the day

Software bugs cause you to believe in a higher power… that likes to mess with your life.

Caught, time and again

Is the solution to this apparent to you? Given this piece of C++ code: // definitions (a and b are primitive types) a = b+1; if (a == b+1) cout

Playing God with Scheme

Pretty sensitive issue this – whether man should be allowed to play God or not. I was a debater once, and I’ve pretty much debated this with dozens of arguments from each side. One thing you can’t argue with, though: playing God is fun. I was playing around with Scheme today (for the uninitiated and/or […]

How great minds really think

One blogger out there had the amazing idea of e-mailing a few great programmers and asking questions related to coding. He’s posted the answers, and they’re definitely worth a read, and probably a lot of thought as well.

Thunderbird, etc.

I have been looking to a way to link Thunderbird and Growl for showing me mail notification messages for a while now. Thanks to this post, I was able to get it working today. One issue I faced that I have four mail accounts in Thunderbird and I don’t care about three of them, but […]